How do you become Moreno Neri?
I've often asked myself this question
His name regularly appeared at the bottom of the pages of the history books of my region, Le Marche, which I was about to study in depth, especially when elements that were not immediately easy to interpret emerged.
I won't go into why or how, but once I found out that he was from Rimini, practically close to home, that the subject dealt with themes that had always attracted me since I was a child, I brought to light a story that had been buried, together with the bones of a certain philosopher, Giorgio Gemisto Pletone, which lie, apparently inexplicably, in the third ark on the side of Leon Battista Alberti's Malatesta temple, I translated his writings, which my idol from Recanati had also dealt with - the fame of Giorgio Gemisto Pletone Costantinopolitano is silent in the present tense - that Giacomo whom I love but who I often avoid delving into for fear of being shipwrecked in certain seas.
Once I discovered that he was from Rimini, I was saying, I contacted his first publisher, bought all his books and asked for clarifications on the subject. Raffaelli had been generous that day, he had welcomed me into his office, he wanted to talk and he had even lit up when he mentioned the philosopher whose remains were not far from his headquarters, like a relic, as if he emanated messages that I am inexplicably attracted to but that I struggle to grasp, buried as I am, probably, by material substrates sedimented over time, I won't even say how many and which ones.
- I don't know if you'll be able to talk to him. - I remember he told me - he's always busy with a thousand things. -
Then in the end I made up my mind: I want to meet him and ask him this question directly, maybe he will simply answer that he has always been Moreno Neri, he has not become one, which seems more coherent and natural to me with his person.
And in any case, finding him wasn't easy, the subject isn't one who gives himself up willingly, as is right, perhaps he was attracted by my insistence, perhaps he understood that I wouldn't leave him alone very easily, perhaps he even enjoyed telling another story, this time his own, without the need for interpreters and translators.
The fact is that someone who briefly describes himself as a former organizer of Rimini nights and then transforms himself into a translator and editor of a flood of texts from Greek and Latin as well as the author of around one hundred and fifty titles between books and essays published in important publishing houses without having the classic academic education between degrees and masters or doctorates as is usual, could not fail to attract my attention.
In my opinion Moreno Neri is a scholar who is decidedly outside the box, full of courage and heroic like few others. I thank him for granting me an audience and this is what came out of it.
Lorenza Cappanera : Moreno Neri, how do we begin?
He lights a cigarette, we are sitting, me, him and another journalist, outside a bar near the Tiberio Bridge in Rimini. It is a hot summer morning and we are surrounded by tourists from all over.
I like this place, it erases the stereotypical image that I have always had of this city that has made mass tourism its main key to understanding, there is a park and a river and above all a Roman work of an emperor that I particularly love and, above all, it seems to be elsewhere.
In fact, let's go back in time immediately, we are in the year 2000 in Milan and Giuseppe Girgenti, then a collaborator of Giovanni Reale, the greatest Plato scholar alive at the time, promotes the meeting.
Reale has read Moreno Neri's works on Giorgio Gemisto Pletone and wants to meet him.
Moreno Neri: I go to Bompiani and am received in the large building on Via Solferino, the room completely covered with translations of “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco in various languages. Reale asks me to go to Bompiani and edit a work on the writings of Pletone as he had done with Plato. I answer that it is impossible, some texts have never been transcribed, but I propose to publish another book: the “ Commentary on Scipio's dream” by Macrobius which is a text taken from Cicero’s Republic. Perfect. They are including it in the series “Western Thought”.
It was a work that I had in the drawer for some time because I had translated it myself, I won't tell you why, I needed it for the Tempio Malatestiano.
NdA I would like to buy it but it is unobtainable, so for now I am content with the description I find on the internet: the text presents the most important doctrines of late-ancient philosophical religion: the existence of the intelligible world, the immortality of the soul and its afterlife destinies, as well as the paradigms of the good life for man down here, together with extensive digressions on the interpretations of the types of dreams and their respective prophetic capacities, the science of Pythagorean numbers ....
Moreno Neri : in the meantime, with the publisher Raffaeli, he published “The representations of the Malatesta Temple ” by Charles Mitchell, of the Warburg Institute in London, which is the largest centre for Renaissance studies in the world, founded by Aby Warburg, the son of Jewish bankers.
Mitchell gave two lectures which I translated for Raffaelli, in which he argued that many of the bas-reliefs were expressly based on one of the few Platonic texts known in Italy in 1450, namely Macrobius 's "Commentary on the Dream of Scipio . "
I thus realized that there were no Italian editions translated from Latin.
All the texts of the Platonists, Plotinus, Porphyry, were published in Latin translations between 1480 and 1490 by Marsilio Ficino. Until 1450, little of Plato was known except the Timaeus , but it was banned because it spoke of a Demiurge who created everything from formless matter and not of a creator God.
Cosimo de' Medici and then Bessarion somewhat unblocked this opposition of the Roman Church. And even Gemisto Pletone was frowned upon because he praised paganism. Marsilio Ficino and Bessarion tried to reconcile Platonism with Christianity in the end and I must say that from a strategic point of view they did well, because this is how we know Plato today, even if we ignore how we know him, or we forget about it.
It should be noted – he continues – that this text on which Marsilio Ficino will work to translate Plato's dialogues was donated by Gemisto Pletone to Cosimo de' Medici when he came to Florence in 1439. I don't know if we realize... that's why Ficino then calls him the second Plato.
Lorenza Cappanera : A truly fascinating story. But I'd like to delve a little deeper into you, if you don't mind. I'd like to know how the metamorphosis happens. When and how you decide to move from the mundane to the more intimate life of writing—from nigredo to albedo, in short.
Moreno Neri looks at me, speechless. He gets scared and then says:
MN You want a biography, basically? But I'm not used to talking about myself, I let my writings do that. – pause – Ok, I'll tell you briefly, otherwise I sound like a sort of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
I study classical studies, after high school I wanted to enroll in Literature but then I switched to Law which I didn't finish because in the meantime I got married and became the father of a little girl.
I never finished university. I later enrolled in Sociology, but after three or four exams I dropped out, too. Despite this, for about ten years now, first the University of Insubria, then Bologna, and then Urbino, have offered me a chair in Renaissance esotericism , but I don't drive and would have to take the train or bus. Too inconvenient.
LC . Incredible. Sorry, there are people who would do anything to get a teaching position. – I say smiling, but he doesn't respond and continues his story.
MN . But I go even further back, to 1968 when I attended Ordine Nuovo and Franco Freda's publishing house at the Liceo Classico, among others. I absolutely don't regret it because it introduced me to Julius Evola and Arturo Reghini. Keep in mind that back then, if you read "The Lord of the Rings," you were automatically a fascist. Incidentally, it was Adelphi that legalized these texts, if I think about it.
Then I became a radical militant, I fell in love with Marco Pannella, I collected signatures with stalls in the squares for divorce, for abortion, for public financing of political parties, then I moved on to the PSI of Craxi and Martelli and I had two membership cards, radical and socialist, something I always had until 1997 when I abandoned politics.
I must say that in the meantime I was writing for newspapers, I was considered a promising writer, my mother has always had a very close emotional bond with Sergio Zavoli's brother, I could have gone to Rome, I don't know if I can explain myself... but I'm not an incorruptible type, I have very high prices, I'm out of the market, in short...
LC But how do you become the entertainer of Rimini nights? –
MN . I became president of ARCI and immediately realized that there was room for significant leisure activities within it. So, after a couple of years as president of ARCI, I set up a cultural cooperative that I joined the League of Cooperatives, called ONU – One Nation Underground – taken from a line from a Bob Marley song. It lasted about twelve years, and we ran venues that became famous, like Slego, Rock Hudson's, and the IO Street Club, where concerts by bands coming straight from London were held, or at the Rimini stadium, where I once brought together Zucchero, Joe Cocker, and Miles Davis. That night, when we closed the tills, we found ourselves with a bag full of millions, eighty or ninety or something like that. My wife and I looked at each other and said: if we take a flight to Cuba, we'll live like royalty. In those days, there wasn't even extradition.
LC And instead….
MN Then Susy Blady, Paolo Roversi and also Paolo Rossi, did many avant-garde things, both from a musical and theatrical point of view.
We were the first to occupy Rimini Castle, which was practically closed at the time. We held an open-air film festival that lasted two and a half months. There was an initiative, Gradisca , that preceded the Notte Rosa , which lasted for three or four years, and we ended up in the Guinness Book of Records because we organized a table party on the 12-kilometer-long beach with the help of the lifeguards.
Pier Vittorio Tondelli, who was a dear friend of mine, often spoke about us, the nonsense we said was bounced around in the press, such as Rimini like Hollywood, with the photomontage of the Covignano hill with the writing Rimini.
Everyone was excited, including the mayor of Cattolica, who at a certain point proposed building a theme park on the water's edge – au bord de l'eau – which was equivalent to a brothel, so Cattolica was presenting itself as a city where there was a public brothel.
It was the 1980s and Rimini was the driving force of creativity, I often met Umberto Eco on the beach, we didn't take fashions from outside, but we, the people of Rimini, created them ourselves.
By the way, we weren't a cooperative of just a few people, you know, we ended up having about a hundred members, including Stefano Pivato, who was the rector of the University of Urbino in the following years. We were involved in photography, theatre, journalism...
… And this was my first life as an animator, which ended with Tangentopoli. Afterwards, I went back to devoting myself to what I liked when I was twenty-four, twenty-five: writing. No longer writing for newspapers, but books.
And I started with Raffaelli.
LC With Pletone?
MN . I'll tell you why, and brace yourself, because it's a very strange story, one that has to do with my esoteric interests. I had recently joined a Masonic lodge when, in 1998, a delegation of about thirty Greeks from a lodge named after George Gemistos Plethon arrived to pay homage to his tomb. In my lodge, he had met Guido Nozzoli, a great Italian journalist then retired, who could finally dedicate himself to his true vocation: operative alchemy. He had been initiated by Eugène Canseliet, a disciple of the legendary Fulcanelli. He wanted to impart alchemical initiation to me, but I didn't feel suited to it. Without any disappointment, he advised me to begin studying the Tempio Malatestiano. So I acted as a guide to the Greeks. Since then, I have continued to search for where Plethon's ancient philosophy , the one and only Tradition, still lives on, and in what school it has been incarnated in our day. The master was truly one, I met him around 2010, he had a publishing house called Asram Vidya, his name was Raphael and he published the first Italian translation of the Upanishads.
At first he gave conferences and public activities, then at a certain point he retreated to a center with his disciples.
LC Retired where exactly?
MN . No one ever knew, and was careful not to reveal it. He, with great simplicity, went further than René Guénon, if you think about it.
LC . He's a Gemisto too.
MN . I started sending him my books, and he sent me a letter he wrote himself, which moved me a little, and he told me to contact a certain person who would give me access to his community, giving me the opportunity to bring whoever I thought was right. And I brought my wife and some friends.
LC . So in practice entering his Center meant being initiated.
MN . I won't tell you about my wife, she's so scared! Where are you taking me? In the mountains near Rieti, a mix between an ashram and a monastery. A single-story building on a large, fenced estate, a building in the shape of a Greek P, with a little house, his, in the center. All little cells with a bed and a bathroom. Next door was a long building with a living room, a very well-stocked library, a dining room, and kitchens. After that, I went there again, as long as he was alive. He died a few years ago, already almost ninety years old. He was very good.
LC And what are you doing now, are you writing something? –
MN I'm doing something new on Giorgio Gemisto Pletone that I don't want to leave. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Chaldean oracles: Pletone was one of the first editors of the oracles. He took care of them by putting them in a more functional order according to his point of view, he interpreted them and also renamed them, he doesn't attribute them to the two Chaldean magicians of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, Julian the father and Julian the son, but he renamed them magical oracles of the Magi of the Zoroaster tradition, attributing them to him, in short. Zoroaster was before Moses, so it was a sacred text older than the Old Testament. Keep in mind that for him ancient means original and original, that is, everything that comes before and is closer to the beginning, not only in a chronological sense but also in a philosophical sense.
LC.Is it possible that Gemisto Pletone had mediumistic abilities?
MN probably had some intuitions. For example, the treatise on Laws that was burned contains, in the surviving parts, prayers and hymns that he wanted the people to perform at specific times and according to a specific calendar.
It's a particular religion, with philosophical principles, different from the Catholic or Orthodox ones. In some ways, he admired Islam more, and in the end, Bessarion was quite offended by this. The fact is that Islam doesn't have this great concept of free will, while in Christianity it is decisive. By the way, I bought a book called " Determined ," written by one of the greatest scholars of behavioral sciences, which frees us from the idea of free will... I find it quite interesting.
LC: I'll definitely buy it. Now I'll ask you a question that's partly outside the scope of the interview, but I'm curious: why are women excluded from regular Freemasonry?
MNThere is a great discussion among regular Masons and esotericists on the question of female initiation. The Masonic one is a solar initiation so women are excluded but it is an absurdity because it is enough to read Apuleius and his Metamorphosis where it is very well explained that there is no solar initiation and a lunar initiation. They are not distinct, separate. Like arguing about whether God is male or female.
But having said this, Silvia (Ronchey) and I ask ourselves: what happens in the Renaissance where, at a certain point, women are excluded from initiation? Because we are absolutely sure that Cleofe Malatesta had been initiated into the school of Gemisto Pletone, so we know that, at least until 1430, women entered without any problems. The most striking demonstration is Hypatia of Alexandria, even her disciple, Synesius of Cyrene, says that he was initiated by Hypatia.
LC What happened from the Renaissance onwards? –
MN . Something serious, certainly…. Modern Freemasonry, which was born in London in 1717, excludes women.
LC Why this dualism? –
MN I don't know. Besides, if you fall into dualism, you can't understand the background of unity, you're already on a lower level, you're on a lower level of discussion. That is, in my opinion, if you fall into dualism you're already lost in a certain way, you're sailing in shallow waters. And in this, women also have their responsibility: keep in mind that around the beginning of the twentieth century, discussions began in some circles, including the Masonic ones, on the issue of women's suffrage. They gathered them in Rome at Palazzo Giustiniani, held an assembly, invited other uninitiated women and began to kill them with the sword... it's a way of saying, you know... in any case, the great symbolic female lodges began to be reconstituted, which for strange reasons then joined the Scottish rite, which has nothing to do, for example, with the Pythagorean women who are at the origin of our Western Tradition... A great mystery.
Bear in mind that in the Grand Orient there are twenty-three thousand of us at the moment, if we were all active and authentically initiated we could turn Italy upside down, so to speak…..-
I'll end the interview here because in the meantime it's gotten really hot, it's almost one o'clock and my collaborators are looking at their watches. As far as I'm concerned, I would continue asking him questions but I understand that for now that's enough.
By the way, I recently discovered that he also dealt with a fellow citizen of mine who in Ancona is wrongly given little consideration, namely Ciriaco Pizzecolli about whom there would still be much to say and who has to do with the Malatestas, Pletone, the Adriatic and Byzantium. Is he also an initiate? We will find out next time, if Moreno Neri allows it.
